ABSTRACT
The logical consequence of the views I have described was that in such a society Christians could only be oppressed. ‘A barbarous and uncivilisable race of Tartars’ was holding Christians ‘in the most degrading form of slavery’, wrote an angry critic at the time of the Bulgarian agitation. 1 Ottoman attempts at reform were brushed aside. The constitution of 1876 was no more than ‘a crafty contrivance for concentrating the government of the Turkish Empire in the hands of the Pashas which means, taking them all in all, about two hundred of the most unmitigated scoundrels on the face of the earth’. 2
